19:1 Resonant imaginaries and sound clashes: contemporary — political — disruptive — polyrhythmic.
19:1 Editorial: Resonant imaginaries and sound clashes: contemporary — political — disruptive — polyrhythmic.
Artist/Writers: Anabelle Lacroix, Shareeka Helaluddin and Aasma Tulika, Daisy and Nicholas Currie Edwina Stevens, Nadeem Tiafau Eshraghi and Ripley Kavara, mgmgmgmg, Hannah Wickramasuriya, Hayden Ryan, Justine Makdessi, Geoff Robinson, Samuel Beilby, Victoria Pham, Wen Pei Low, Suneel Jethani.
Edited By Lucreccia Quintanilla
Editor introduction:
May 2025
Humour and playfulness are important invitational devices. When deployed correctly they not only allow for ease and comfort but for complexity. They are great companions to rigour. With this in mind, I approached the call out for submissions for this issue that is focused around sound — in my opinion one of the most serious of Western artistic fields — with humour. I am happy to say that a bunch of very talented artists and writers really picked up what I was putting down. It was a relief. Also, it was an incredible and deep honour.
Horror, however, is ever present. No matter where it is that you find yourself reading this issue, I think we can all agree it is a very serious time globally. This may be a good time as any to engage with the idea that perhaps art may not exist in a utopian formalist purity vacuum of shapes, gestures or sounds. That perhaps there are some pretty active ghosts around.
Within this issue, the artistic scene equivalent of Live, Love, Laugh-style catch phrases are problematised and examined with erudite precision and interrogation from both First Nations and settler perspectives. Here you’ll find pieces that speak of what it means to be making artworks during a time of ecological and cultural uncertainty. Groups of strangers and friends walk and make sounds together. Here they ask what it means to engage in experiments, sometimes making sounds simultaneously whilst in different locations. Another contributor asks, what it may mean to play a record so much your hands begin to mould the sound as you imagine yourself as part of a larger and yet more intimate and tactile sound world? A large part of these writings were made in collaboration and yes, there is a lot to listen to.
Here the metronome standard becomes redundant in that complex transcultural body responses encounter the fast end of the BPM spectrum or unsuspecting commuters encounter NOISE. But I suggest you slow down on your misplaced anti-PLURR knee-jerk response. Consider what it may mean to make space for collective grief and recuperation for an Arab artistic, activist and music community. In this instance the audience is as crucial to the space of improvisation as the sound making itself.
In this issue you’ll find a huge breadth of approaches to sound as a form; this collection is multidisciplinary and collective in its manifestations. For me, it has become a source of inspiration to think and move beyond the manufactured boundaries and hierarchies built around artistic disciplines. I hope you find it so too. x